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Arnold Sports Festival

Man’s body of work is a life well-lived

Mike Francois took pride in his body, sculpting it into a work of art. Then he learned what mattered.

Personal trainer Michael Francois oversees Mark Younger’s lifting style at Metro Fitness in Worthington. In 1995, Francois became the only local resident to win the Arnold Classic.

View LargerNEAL C. LAURON | DISPATCHMichael Francois accepts the first place award from Arnold Schwarzenegger after winning the Classic in 1995. Three years later, he was clinging to life in a hospital bed.

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Mike Francois doesn’t go to bodybuilding competitions anymore, not even to watch. There’s a part
of him that still can’t let go. In 1995, Francois was hamming it up under the stage lights, all
bronzed and glistening and popping those enormous thighs that Arnold Schwarzenegger himself couldn’t
stop talking about. It was Francois’ first shot at the Arnold Classic, and he took home the
trophy. The crowd roared. He flexed.

Three years later, Francois clung to life in a hospital bed. Those fantastic muscles were gone.
He was 100 pounds lighter, an ostomy bag hanging from his body.

“It was pretty demoralizing,” Francois said.

Now, he’s 47 and happy. He’s alive. He has a wife he loves and two boys he appreciates more than
any bodybuilding title. He’s a personal trainer and still in excellent shape.Francois says he’s a
boring guy living in Galena — someone who watches kid’s movies and considers a fat-free cheese
pizza a splurge — but he’s content.

Still ...

“I never got to finish what I started.”

There’s still a muscle man inside that boring dad.

Francois stumbled into bodybuilding, if a man can do such a thing. He was an Iowa farm kid, a
natural athlete, but his dream was to be a Catholic priest. A girl named Shannan changed that. He
dropped out of seminary in Columbus with a year left.

“How do you know when you meet the right person?” he said. “How do you fall in love? One thing
led to another, and you can’t imagine your life without that person.”

They married in 1991. He worked as an office manager for a nutrition company, which gave him
more time to lift weights. Francois started getting big. He entered a few bodybuilding competitions
and did better than he expected. So he went for it. The big show. The Arnold.

Old video from the 1995 Arnold Classic follows Francois strutting on the stage in a tiny black
bikini bottom. Bobby Brown’s
My Prerogative plays in the background, and ladies in the audience dance while Francois
performs a series of required poses. He’s a beast, a V-shaped block of gleaming muscle and bulging
veins.

“He’s known for his gigantic thighs,” Schwarzenegger notes.

That night, Francois became the first — and still only — local man to win the title. He told a
reporter he expected to peak in the next four years. He took a year off from the Arnold, placed
third in 1997 and was a favorite in 1998.

But pain in his abdomen had grown too intense to ignore.

“He was in absolutely great competitive condition,” Arnold organizer Jim Lorimer said at the
time. “Oh, he would have placed if he didn't win.”

He dropped out less than two weeks before the 1998 Classic, hospitalized with ulcerative
colitis. Doctors removed his colon during one surgery and reattached his small intestine in a
follow-up procedure.

That last time, he developed a blood clot in his abdomen the size of a soccer ball. He never
knew how close he was to dying, but he felt the small things in life take on new meaning. Birds,
the sun shining on him, all of that. He weighed 170, down from a high of 270.

“I was not even concerned with how I looked at that point. I was just so happy to be alive.”

Distance from a hospital room, though, has a way of returning a man to his normal thoughts. You
don’t think about birds chirping. You think about how you once beat a bunch of guys on a global
stage, how you were judged better than those herculean specimens that even you found
unbelievable.

You think: “I never got to finish what I started.”

Francois will return to the Arnold stage on Saturday. He’ll be honored with some of the other
winners from the past 24 years, including four-time champ Flex Wheeler and three-timer Jay Cutler.
He’ll try not to wonder what could have been. Because when it’s over, he’ll go home with his wife
to his boys and his boring, happy life, and he’ll remember something he hopes others think of him —
that his body isn’t who he is.